Is the Tea Party opposed to Islam?

The Sugar Land Tea Party gathered a bigger-than-average crowd, about 130 people up to 200 people, attendees estimate, to hear activist and right-wing blogger Pamela Geller.

Geller’s speech had been moved from the Hyatt Place because of the controversial nature of her work. The group ended up at the Sugar Land Community Center, where a few dozen protesters—many of them Muslims, as well as African-Americans—held signs outside reading, “Love Thy Neighbor” and “No to Hate.”

“I know I’m painted as a racist, Islamophobic, anti-Muslim bigot, and if you said these things, you’d be painted as a racist, Islamophobic, anti-Muslim bigot,” Gellar told the crowd, her voice enthusiastic and thick with a New York accent. “This is the way they silence anyone who touches this subject.”

For Geller, author of Stop the Islamization of Americaand co-founder of an organization of the same name, criticism of her views is evidence that the country won’t let people say negative things about Islam, thereby upholding sharia law.

Geller elicited gasps, applause and shouting responses for her long list of injustices in America, including a quick blow at Gov. Rick Perry for his relationship with the Aga Khan, which led to curricula about Islam in Texas schools.

“She tells the truth,” said Judy Schmid, an organizer with the Sugar Land Tea Party. “We (hosted Geller) as public education, because this is what the Tea Party does.”

Schmid’s disappointed with the current Republican field, who haven’t touched the issue of Islam in America in months. She wants to see local groups band together to acknowledge and fight the “stealth jihad” going on in public institutions and companies.

More than half of Tea Party members believe that American Muslims want to establish sharia as the law of the land in the U.S., according to a Public Religion Research Institute survey, compared to 30 percent of the population overall. They are also more likely than other groups, even Republicans, to say the U.S. is a Christian nation.

“The Tea Party started out about small government, but it’s grown beyond that,” said Matt Duss, national security policy analyst at the Center for American Progress. “The Islamaphobes have staked their claim to one part of Tea Party.”

The crowd at Geller’s event seemed to come from all walks of life, some in patriotic T-shirts with American flags and eagles, some in business suits, but it was clear that they all had something in common: an unease with Muslim accommodations, illegal immigration and “leftist institutions,” everyone from the White House to the mainstream media.

You could see the eye-rolls at every mention of President “Barack Hussein Obama,” and with every story Geller told, she’d point out that this is the kind of thing you’d never hear in the media, and that’s why it’s so important that Tea Partiers stand up and fight.

“America is the first moral government in the history of man based on individual rights,” she said, the crowd clapping. “That’s what I’m fighting for. I will oppose anyone who acts to take away my freedom.”